Shooting suspect ID'ed: Man has history of weapons charges

Expand PhotoSubmitted photo/Christoffer Montelius, North San Juan Fire District |

Emergency personnel transport a suspect who sustained two gunshot wounds in an officer-related shooting incident Saturday near Edwards Crossing of the South Yuba River in Nevada County. The incident involved a California Highway Patrol offcer and a Bureau of Land Management officer, who was reportedly doing well after sustaining a gunshot wound to the shoulder.

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The man arrested in connection with a shooting that injured two law enforcement officers Saturday already was facing weapons charges in Nevada County, according to court records.

Brent Douglas Cole, 60, is in stable condition in the intensive care unit at Sutter Roseville Medical Center as of Monday afternoon, according to Nevada County Sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Pettitt.

Cole had been flown to Roseville, along with a wounded Bureau of Land Management ranger, on Saturday afternoon after the incident near Edwards Crossing on the South Yuba River.

The second officer who was reportedly injured in the shootout was identified Monday as California Highway Patrol Officer Brant Hardin, a veteran officer of more than 20 years assigned to the Grass Valley office.

The BLM ranger, whose name has not yet been made available, also was treated and released for a reported gunshot wound to the shoulder.

According to Tassone, on Saturday around noon, CHP officers received a request from BLM personnel to assist with an investigation involving vehicles in the campground area.

Hardin met up with a BLM officer around 2:30 p.m., and the two headed together through a small brush trail leading into to a makeshift campsite area off North Bloomfield Road, a little less than a mile north of Edwards Crossing.

As the two officers were conducting their investigation, they reportedly were confronted by Cole.

Tassone said the officers then began to engage in combat shooting with the suspect for several minutes and Cole reportedly suffered multiple gunshot wounds.

The investigation is being headed up by the Sheriff’s Office due to the multi-jurisdictional nature of officers from state and federal agencies being involved in a shooting on federal property, Pettitt said.

The shooting scene was processed by the Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Unit with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigations evidence collection team and the California Highway Patrol’s Multidisciplinary Accident Investigations team.

“We are handling the criminal investigation, doing the interviews,” Pettitt said. “We’ll forward our investigation to the District Attorney’s Office.”

It is not known at this point if the case would be prosecuted by the federal government or the state, or locally, he said.

Cole had been arrested by the Sheriff’s Office in late January and charged with carrying a loaded firearm and having a concealed firearm in a vehicle. Cole chose to represent himself in the misdemeanor case, and filed a motion to suppress the evidence, which was denied on June 5. He was scheduled to return to court on June 30.

In the documents Cole filed in Nevada County Superior Court, he asserted that “Officers acted without warrant or any probable cause to seize my person using a swat team style assault, and then started looking for something to charge me with. I was attacked and molested, unconstitutionally arrested, unlawfully incarcerated, repeatedly intimidated and coerced to plead guilty to having committed a crime, held in secret for five days, and my property and liberty taken from me since January 26, 2014. I am being persecuted for being a gun owner, and for exercising my inherent Right by unwitting or unknowing accomplices of a seditious conspiracy against rights instituted by foreign powers inimical to the United States of America.”

Cole has posted on the United Truth Seekers website, writing in regards to an arrest that “I was protecting life and property by discharging a weapon to stop a violent assault, which had devolved to a struggle over a loaded gun when I fired into the floor.

“They put me through a criminal trial for five months,” Cole wrote in the post.

Further information on Cole’s criminal history was not immediately available.